For Sonic Youth die-hards, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore’s split felt like losing your calm and collected parents: tragic and perhaps traumatizing for some. But since the split, Kim reconnected with her roots in the world of visual and performance art—starting the improvisational guitar duo Body/Head and performing alongside artist/musician Jutta Koether at MOCA’s opening of Mike Kelley’s retrospective—all while writing her memoir, Girl In A Band. It even debuted at #2 on The New York Times bestsellers list last week. The notoriously tight-lipped artist and musician wrote candidly about her childhood in Los Angeles, her schizophrenic brother, her divorce, and the dissolution of Sonic Youth, one of the most influential noise bands of the last thirty years. On Saturday, she wrapped up a nationwide book tour that featured speakers Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, musician Aimee Mann, and MOCA Curator Bennett Simpson, who joined over the weekend.
OC caught her talk with Bennett Simpson at MOCA Grand Avenue, where she recalled the New York post-punk scene, talked about her ascendant sign, and reveals one of her all-time favorite TV moments.
ON HER ROOTS:
In Kim’s own words, her memoir is “the most conventional thing I’ve ever done.” The book spans her years growing up in Los Angeles, which she credits as more formative than any periods she spent with artists like Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, and Richard Prince. But it was at the UCLA Lab School, the experimental elementary school, “where [she learned] everything by acting things out.” Musically, she referenced acts including The Velvet Underground, whose influence loomed over emerging bands in 1980s New York: “The Velvet Underground was always there—an unattainable legacy.”
ON ASTROLOGY:
Kim Gordon, born on April 28, is a Taurus, a Capricorn ascendant (“not that great, but as well-aspected as it could be,”) with a moon in Libra. She and artist Dan Graham, who she met the same night she met Mike Kelley at one of Dan’s lectures at CalArts, share a love of astrology, and perhaps a little healthy competition. “My astrology person is probably better than his,” she joked.
ON NEW YORK AND LOS ANGELES:
New York today is “a city on steroids,” Kim told Simpson. “I don’t feel so inspired by it right now.” With her daughter, Coco, enrolled in art school, could Kim be contemplating a return to Los Angeles? She certainly appears drawn to the creative laboratory of LA’s art scene, which she compares to Berlin for its distance from the commercialism of New York’s art industry. “It allows things to happen that wouldn’t happen in New York.”
ON FEMINISM:
“I think for a long time I was successfully ambiguous about [feminism],” said the woman who, twenty-five years ago on the Sonic Youth single “Kool Thing,” asked Chuck D: “Are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” But at MOCA, she told Simpson with an air of distance, “The riot grrrl movement took it on and did it so well. There’s a lot of subject matter to write about as a woman that hasn’t been heard before.” Of all her work with Sonic Youth, she named “Shaking Hell” from 1983’s Co
OC caught her talk with Bennett Simpson at MOCA Grand Avenue, where she recalled the New York post-punk scene, talked about her ascendant sign, and reveals one of her all-time favorite TV moments.
ON HER ROOTS:
In Kim’s own words, her memoir is “the most conventional thing I’ve ever done.” The book spans her years growing up in Los Angeles, which she credits as more formative than any periods she spent with artists like Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, and Richard Prince. But it was at the UCLA Lab School, the experimental elementary school, “where [she learned] everything by acting things out.” Musically, she referenced acts including The Velvet Underground, whose influence loomed over emerging bands in 1980s New York: “The Velvet Underground was always there—an unattainable legacy.”
ON ASTROLOGY:
Kim Gordon, born on April 28, is a Taurus, a Capricorn ascendant (“not that great, but as well-aspected as it could be,”) with a moon in Libra. She and artist Dan Graham, who she met the same night she met Mike Kelley at one of Dan’s lectures at CalArts, share a love of astrology, and perhaps a little healthy competition. “My astrology person is probably better than his,” she joked.
ON NEW YORK AND LOS ANGELES:
New York today is “a city on steroids,” Kim told Simpson. “I don’t feel so inspired by it right now.” With her daughter, Coco, enrolled in art school, could Kim be contemplating a return to Los Angeles? She certainly appears drawn to the creative laboratory of LA’s art scene, which she compares to Berlin for its distance from the commercialism of New York’s art industry. “It allows things to happen that wouldn’t happen in New York.”
ON FEMINISM:
“I think for a long time I was successfully ambiguous about [feminism],” said the woman who, twenty-five years ago on the Sonic Youth single “Kool Thing,” asked Chuck D: “Are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” But at MOCA, she told Simpson with an air of distance, “The riot grrrl movement took it on and did it so well. There’s a lot of subject matter to write about as a woman that hasn’t been heard before.” Of all her work with Sonic Youth, she named “Shaking Hell” from 1983’s Co